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By Rob Thom

It’s Sunday 7th November and I’m sitting on the 13.20 train to London St. Pancras, having just finished my first Sheffield Doc/Fest. I’ve been to 18 screenings and seen 35 documentaries, both short and feature length: Geral, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, Beats of Freedom, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Cutting Loose, 12 Angry Lebanese, No Easy Time, Nostalgia for the Light, Nasty Age, On the Coast, Hope, Behind This Sea, The Battle for Barking, PS Your Mystery Sender, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Barber's Dozen, The Flaw, The Mystery of Flying Kicks, Player Hating: A Love Story, Quadrangle, Catfish, Love in One Breath, The Oath, The Barbarians, ...but Film is My Mistress, Mind, Alan Bennett And The Habit of Art, Diary, Russian Lessons, Legend: A Film About Greg Garing, Sex Magic, Manifesting Maya, Big Birding Day, 12th & Delaware, If We Had One More Day... and Scenes from a Teenage Killing.

Of all the wonderful films I saw, my mind keeps thinking back to five in particular, the first of which was Zelina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese, which charted the journey of prisoners in Lebanon’s Roumieh Prison as they take part in a theatre project to perform an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s play 12 Angry Men. I doubt I was the only one in the library theatre on Thursday morning trying not to cry; the way the film managed to capture the journey that transformed a bunch of individual prisoners, both skeptical of the theatre project itself and apprehensive and reticent to reveal their personalities and personal circumstances to each other, to a true band of brothers, working and depending on each other to perform the famous play, was a extraordinary reveal of group achievement and personal redemption. What was also incredibly moving was seeing these hardened criminals’ fear of what would happen to their lives, and the trust and hope they had developed in each other once the project was over. Furthermore, the director who had very much become a parental figure whom they had grown to depend on would leave their lives.

The same evening I was lucky enough to see The Battle for Barking, Laura Fairrie’s absorbing film that documents the 2010 UK General Election in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, and the battle between Labour and The British National Party to gain control of the parliamentary seat. What was extraordinary for me was the apparent non-judgmental nature of the film, a point I felt was somewhat lost on sections of the audience, who were very politicized. It seemed felt Fairrie was somehow obligated to make a film that professed obvious anti-facist sentiment. Indeed, it could be argued that had someone with no prior knowledge of the subject matter walked into the middle of the screening, they could be forgiven for thinking Nick Griffin and his fellow BNP members were local heroes fighting a just cause, whilst simultaneously finding Margaret Hodge’s motives and tactics for election suspect. For me, Fairrie’s respect and trust in both her subjects to speak for themselves without any external narrative guidance added during the edit, and the viewer’s intellect to arrive at their own conclusions, made The Battle for Barking worthy of all the praise it has been receiving.

It was a real joy to see so many short films play to large audiences on large screens. I especially enjoyed Barber’s Dozen, Diary and The Mystery of Flying Kicks. My favourite short film was Quadrangle, which screened with Catfish; beautifully shot and paced with a constant split-screen technique allowing two interviews to weave together effortlessly. The use of jump-cuts during interviews was surprisingly enhancing, rather than distancing, Amy Grappell’s short film about the overlapping sexual relationships between the parents of two families was simply and masterfully told.

Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Catfish was a riot of laughs, shot brilliantly, and the only film during the festival to really scare me. The filmmakers drove up to a deserted farm house in the middle of the night from New York, which gave me flashbacks to the evening I sat, constantly terrified, through The Blair Witch Project.  I’m pretty sure it was faked - if you stole a song from You Tube to repost and claim as your own, would you A) have the know how to turn a video file to an audio file, and B) wouldn’t you, to hide your tracks, perhaps, you know, re-name the song? - though as someone pointed out to me, maybe it doesn’t really matter if it was real or not.

Scenes From a Teenage Killing was the last film I saw before leaving Sheffield, and at a running time of two hours, it was a long hard portrait of the destruction left in the wake of teenage murder in the UK. With extraordinary access to family members, and a breadth of communities at their most vulnerable and distraught, director Morgan Matthews never shied away from their unbearable pain as they all struggled to make sense of the new worlds they found themselves in, and both the bittersweet justice and anguish of injustice as cases traveled through the criminal justice system. It was an exceptional portrait that strived, and I felt succeeded, to show the complexities of individual circumstances that the media and society at large have all too often chosen to simplify and categorise as Gang Violence. In the Q&A that followed, I asked if the filmmakers had sought to interview the perpetrators of the crimes and their families. Part of me still wonders if this was a pointless and somewhat insensitive question to ask at a screening where other members of the audience were so driven by personal experience to say how affected they had been by the power of the film. However, I can’t help feeling that the film cannot claim to be a full portrait of the devastation wreaked by teenage murder on communities if individuals on both sides of such destruction aren’t involved in the debate.

I went to the festival thinking the portraits of Basquiat, Burroughs and Bergman were going to be my highlights. Instead, it was the observational pieces mentioned above, where filmmakers gave their contributors the respect and freedom to reveal their characters and express their complexities without judgment, that were truly inspiring.

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For more on the DFG Doc/Fest experience read these:

DFG's Doc/Fest Diary

Who won at the Sheffield Doc/Fest?

Festival

Sheffield DocFest

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